Abstract: Approximately 135,000 Brazilians die from smoking-related diseases every year. Due to the relevance of this public health issue, many governments propose public policies to reduce cigarette consumption. Smoking bans are the most common measures, regulating at the highest level 18% of the world population in 2014 (WHO). In Brazil, this policy was first implemented locally, by a few states and municipalities, from 2008 on. The national regulation became effective only in 2014. In this paper we explore such regional differences in the law adoption to evaluate the impacts on cigarette consumption. We propose a difference-in-differences approach to estimate the impacts throughout the years and in two age groups (adults and young adults).

We build a panel using micro data from the Tobacco Special Research and from the National Health Research, both collected by the Brazilian Bureau of Statistics (IBGE). The preliminary results indicate that smoking bans reduced daily cigarette consumption among young adults around 6%, by influencing smoking quit. No impacts were found on smoking initiation. Robustness tests show that the results estimated are consistent.